A place for what tickles my curiosity in life and in technology. A review of development platforms I have played with and plans for the future.

Monday, 19 August 2013

App Catalog Growing, Safaricom Appwiz Incubation and More

Hello all, Hope you have been doing great. For me, I have been quite engaged in a lot of things here and there on the tech scene but at least i can say I am making some progress. The year started with me achieving the goal of buying a laptop and that has been a major step to all that I have done this year. With the laptop, I have been able to do some odd jobs online and managed to pay my own school fees. This has been quite a relief to my dad who is paying for my younger sister who is still in high school. At least nowadays I am the one sending my parents money and not the other way round.
I also managed to make it to the Safaricom appwiz incubation. We are 18 teams who made it to the finals and we a re currently undergoing some business incubation to teach us how to actually turn apps into businesses that are capable of sustaining us. I have decided to stop doing the odd jobs given that we were promised an allowance which is quite enough to sustain me for the holiday. At the moment, I sneaked away from the incubation to come to school and do the final exams for this year. I can say so far the exams have been good given the fact that there are only two non-computer courses. I hope I will be able to finish the exams and get back to the incubation without anyone noticing.
After the incubation, I will be at Microsoft offices in Nairobi building a windows phone version of the same using the Unity3d game engine. Am actually looking forward to that!!
On the android development scene, I have managed to get myself a developer account and so far, I have three apps.
1. Stupid Button https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lazy.bones.stupidbutton
2. BMI Calculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lazy.bones.bmicalculator
3. Mulika Mwizi https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lazy.bones.mulikamwizi
I will be making and releasing more apps every week as I am aiming to make around $500 per month on the apps which is actually enough to sustain me comfortably for the rest of the time I will be in school. So far, I have barely made $10 so am going to do more research on android monetization using ads now that Google Play does not accept paid applications from African developers. I will grow the app portfolio and try as much as I can to optimize the monetization techniques.
That is all for now but in case of new events, I will definitely keep you guys in the loop.